Product: Audio, chat and video room app for mental health awareness and support
Challenge: To understand user needs and core problem statements. Moreover, evaluate the notion of how to make the new app a habitual product to increase mental health awareness.
Approach: Understanding the current market needs with thorough competitor research and mapping the persona of the target user with business objectives. Also, integrating technology to increase the adaptiveness of the product via a design thinking approach.
Outcome: Implement touchpoints for users to interact via chat, audio rooms (like clubhouse) or video.
Duration: 6-8 online sprint weeks (Design Thinking Approach and tools)
Role: Lead Product & UX ( research, UI/UX, logic design)
Mobile health (mhealth) applications have recently gained popularity in both academia and industry, due to their effect on user’s wellness, health and security. Likewise, a prolific case in the same light is mental mhealth applications services which provide ease of use access to sensitive topics around mental health . Moreover, mhealth apps have shown evidence in helping people in recovery from chronic mental illnesses and helping users with easy access to medical help. In addition, the current mhealth literature also highlights that conversational led applications may provide better results with mental health counselling with teenagers.
However, few studies around mhealth have showcased the ineffectiveness of mhealth apps on user’s fitness, body improvement and similar health issues. Yet, there are only limited studies focused on highlighting the incongruences or suggesting improvements in the mhealth apps around design features, functionality, interaction or user experience. Moreover, this calls for a need for research around the efficacy of mhealth apps, in that focusing on the relationship among the users, the interface and the incumbent application. Hence, for this purpose, the study closely follows the example of “moodtalks” a live audio conversation led mhealth mobile application project at LSE, UK
Decided to adopt a design thinking led product development process, which followed these steps – empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test.
This process helped the team members follow a guideline around understanding the needs of the user, in that it helped associate problem statements around the incumbent user. Moreover, this process also led to user persona creation, understanding customer journey maps and building ideas around it.
See Prototype
